Jon Burge’s testimony impressed me more than it impressed the jury that a few days later convicted him of lying under oath about the brutalization of suspects in his custody. From where I sat in the federal courtroom, Burge had sounded like the kind of tough Chicago cop you’d be glad to have on your side, serving and protecting. John Conroy‘s knowledge of the facts about Burge is close to absolute, and when I got home from court I e-mailed him and said I wished he were the one who’d now get to cross-examine the former police commander.
Torture—like so many of the world’s other crimes and sorrows—isn’t personal, it’s only business.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I think Burge is a guy who was failed by his supervisors,” Conroy told me after the trial ended. “I think that if the first time Burge as a detective pulled somebody in and roughed him up in some way, if his lieutenant said to him, ‘Burge, you do that one more time and I’ll have you guarding the parking lot at 11th and State,’ I don’t think it would’ve happened again. He was a good enough cop without it. He could’ve gone just as far without the torture. It just required some supervision, somebody to say, ‘We don’t do that here,’ and there’s no Jon Burge—Jon Burge is not notorious, he’s a well-regarded cop and serves his career and retires to Florida and all’s well with the world.
“I don’t doubt that someone abused Andrew Wilson after he was arrested,” Mike Royko wrote in 1992. “But we don’t know who did it, and we’ll never know. . . . Since the city doesn’t know, it should let it go.”
Why? The study doesn’t guess. But it cites a 2009 column by Clark Hoyt, then public editor of the New York Times, suggesting that a national debate had erupted over whether waterboarding was torture, and it would’ve been “irresponsible for journalists to preempt this debate by labeling it as such.” In other words, everyone knew waterboarding was torture until Americans were the ones doing it, and then maybe it wasn’t.
Burge’s conviction astonished me. I’d expected at best a hung jury. Conroy, who was in the courtroom for the verdict, told me, “I was, frankly, stunned. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the evidence was there. But it was a jury with only one African-American on it, and defense attorneys tell me you need two. One person can’t withstand the pressure of the 11 others. I thought this jury was pretty distant from the streets of the south side, where all this took place. Yet there seemed to be no hesitation.” Hoping someone had caved in to the others and now regretted it, Burge’s attorneys asked the judge to poll the jurors. “And they all said, ‘Yes, this is my verdict.’” Conroy told me, “and I was really impressed.”
